Mozilla shows just how customizable Boot To Gecko will be

In the very near future, Mozilla’s Boot To Gecko is going to offer smartphone and tablet manufacturers a totally web-based operating system they can offer on their hardware. For fans of all things open source and hackable, Boot To Gecko will be an extremely attractive option for their next mobile device.

Mozilla’s Paul Rouget recently demonstrated just how easy it is to customize your B2G experience. Everything on the screen is HTML5, and that means if you’re willing to do a little source code tinkering you can quickly hack in all kinds of changes. In his two-minute video demo above, Rouget flips quickly to the CSS for the home screen, adjusts the radius for icons from 8 pixels to 50% — and quickly turns them from rounded squares into circles.

Rouget also offers a clear, concise breakdown of what Boot To Gecko is. Like Chrome OS, B2G starts out with the Linux kernel. Android drivers are rolled in for hardware support, and then the Gecko rendering engine is added — the same Gecko engine that powers Firefox on the desktop. Finally, the Gaia launcher is placed on top. Everything beyond Gecko (from Gaia to all the apps) is pure standards-based web code.

Phone functionality (things like making phone calls, sending SMS messages, and snapping pictures) has been bolstered by the addition of new JavaScript APIs that allow deeper access to hardware by HTML5 apps and pages.

B2G is still a work in progress, but if you’ve got a Samsung Galaxy SII or Nexus S you can download a pre-release ROM from GitHub. Don’t expect things to work flawlessly — but do expect to get that same feeling you did the first time you hacked userchrome.css on your desktop.